Word: vandenbergers
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Labor disputes over what union does which jobs have produced continual strife, frequent strikes-and some blatant featherbedding. At Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., according to testimony by former Air Force Contracting Officer Euell Hodge, manifolds that are used to link up the hydraulic systems in the silo arrived from the factory already assembled. The pipefitters demanded that they be allowed to disassemble them and put them together again. Finally, they agreed to settle for "blessing" the manifolds-standing idly by the new equipment for the number of hours they would otherwise have spent assembling it-while, of course, drawing...
...Discoverer XVII, launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, swung into polar orbit, logged 1,000,000 miles in 31 turns around the earth, then, on signal popped its instrument capsule over the Pacific. As if that triumph of precision were not enough, an Air Force C-119 flying boxcar, one of nine planes covering a 12,500-sq.-mi. "ballpark" near Honolulu, snagged the parachuting capsule...
Narrow Margin. Last week Mitchell got another chance. Discoverer XIV had been fired atop a Thor-Agena rocket from Vandenberg, Calif., and once again Mitchell's squadron was alerted. Mitchell slapped a cap on his red-thatched head, kissed his wife and promised: "I'll get it this time, honey." This time he did. But the margin of success was narrow indeed...
Twelve times a Discoverer satellite had been fired, atop a two-stage Thor-Agena rocket, from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.; twelve times it had failed to accomplish its total mission. To prepare the way for that day when a man can be shot into space and brought back alive. Discoverer's task was to control a satellite at will in its orbit and guide it back for recovery, undamaged, at a specific point on the earth's surface...
Sweating It Out. As Discoverer XIII roared off Vandenberg's launching pad last week, it looked exactly like its predecessors. But one important modification had been made. Speculating that previous re-entry failures had been caused by malfunction of tiny rockets designed to stabilize the satellite in orbit-by causing it to spin like a bullet-Lockheed Aircraft Corp. engineers had replaced the rockets with gas jets, anxiously prayed they had guessed right. In the console-banked control room at Sunnyvale, Calif., Air Force Colonel Charles G. ("Moose") Mathison paced the floor while monitoring the countdown and alerting...